John Thune: “Again, agriculture is not a Republican or a Democrat issue. It is something that is important to the future of America…”

“Again, agriculture is not a Republican or a Democrat issue. It is something that is important to the future of America and to our national security, and it is something that we need to be working as a body and focusing on in a cooperative way, in a bipartisan way, to try to solve some of these problems and see that our producers have a living wage, because they do not. All they ask for is a fair price for their products. Unfortunately, as the gentleman from Nebraska pointed out earlier, because of the way that we have to compete with countries that subsidize their farm economies at much higher levels, it does put our producers at a competitive disadvantage. And that is something that we have to try and correct through our trade policies. But we have a responsibility as a Congress to right now focus like a laser beam on the farm bill, on writing a new farm policy, on the energy policy in this country to help increase the prices that farmers receive and to lower the prices they have to pay for their inputs so that that bottom line will begin to show up in the black again instead of in the red.”